SSA 1920 – 2000: ARTIST STUDIO GALLERY OF ORIGINAL PAINTINGS

Press Quotes

Glasgow Herald 2.12.50

More atmospheric and less representational works are contributed among others, Anne Redpath, Margaret Hislop and some of the invited works by such artists as Ursula McCannell, Brenda Mark, Victorine Foot and Mary Fedden advance even further in the direction of cubism or abstraction.

Scotsman 1949: Art Exhibition at French Institute

To consider Miss Foot’s work first. That she is an original artist in the true sense, is apparent at once; in the sense, that is, of possessing an individual colour of mind for which she frequently finds completely successful equivalents in form. Also, though she can be high-minded and serious enough, she has the too rare faculty of being humerous or witty in paint.

Examples of her serious vein are often religious in import, like the large design for a mural “David and Saul,” the “Stabat Mater” or “The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter.”

Her other manner can approach the maliciously grotesque as in the “Cramond Beach” which is very ingenious in design, but she can also give a brilliantly sympathetic comment like the sketch of Jean-Louis Barrault as “Hamlet.”

Art News and Review December 1949: Current Exhibitions LONDON GROUP New Burlington House

Other exhibitors – all of them too well aware of Picasso’s “heretical disruption of the human body” – attempt to seduce the imagination. But if they succeed in the optical splitting of reality, they invariably fail in its subsequent synthesis within a work of art: Brian Robb’s Annunciation, for instance, or Louis Le Broquy’s Child With Doll remain fragmentary and aesthetically illogical.

This lack of aesthetic coherence vitiates even the exuberant qualities of Ceri Richards – and only less pretentious works like Victorine Foot’sOn Cramond Beach– reach a higher unity in spite (or, perhaps, because) of their humility.

The Scotsman London Art Critic 21.04 1950: The Royal Scottish Academy

Just to show that the fantastic exists in the ordinary Victorine Foot (Mrs Eric Schilsky) flies “A Kite in Venice” by someone who will clearly become a ballet dancer one day and whose shadow may become a cubist museum piece.

Scotsman 14.10.1950: The Society of Scottish Artists

…the various delicately witty little social comments by Victorine Foot and Robin Philipson are all paintings “of the idea,” very successful in the communication of exact shades of psychological reaction.

Scotsman 1950’s: The Scottish Society of Women’s Artists

Which is the painting that impresses one most in a tour of the rooms? Is it Anne Redpath’s colour-fantasy, showing a woman seated at a tea table blended into a pattern of pink and lemon, white and red? Is it Victorine Foot’s Monday-morning washing hanging out in the back green? Or Frances Richardson’s “Still Life on a White Stool,” in which everything is arranged with mathematical precision?